March 08, 2009

Portland International Film Festival 32, pt. 3

Everlasting Moments/Maria Larssons eviga ögonblick

Inspired by the life of his wife's great-aunt, Everlasting Moments
plays like Jan Troell's loveletter to family values. Only slight
emotionally dysfunction required to relate. Maria, a young Finnish
woman, is swept off her feet by the charming Sigge, whose zest for life
(and respect for his wife) is quickly ground into dust through the
trials of having to support a rapidly growing family as a low-wage
dockworker. He descends into full-blown alcoholism, chronic infidelity
and violent outbursts that leave his family reeling from embarrassment
and uncertainty. With her husband in and out of jail and work and her
extended family unsympathetic, Maria is left to raise her children and
find small pleasures in their grueling life. She rediscovers a camera
won in a raffle and is convinced by a flirtatious camera shop owner to
keep and use it as a means of expression.

Troell deftly
illustrates the quiet dignity of human kindness with a mercifully light
hand. In one scene Maria asks her eldest daughter to prepare a dead
pigeon for dinner. Maja is a thoughtful, but sensitive adolescent. She
protests, "They have such beautiful eyes, Mama. It's staring at me..."
A situation we've seen in turn of the century, desperately
poverty-stricken stories before and viewers have been trained to expect
a blow up. Yet Maria's reaction is to quietly dismiss her daughter from
the gruesome duty. It comes as an enormous relief because it feels like
what a mother would actually do, an attempt to preserve what little
innocence she can in her child for as long as she can. We see this
theme echoed in scene after scene. As we get to know Maria it's
inspiring to see a great nephew-in-law pay such loving homage to a
woman whose existence was so much about the utility of life.

Speaking
of the utility of life, Everlasting Moments was made for $7 million, a
sum that couldn't even get Jessica Alba into your movie in the States.
This film, however, is an exquisitely rendered period piece. It spans
more than twenty years and looks like it could have easily cost ten
times more.

Everlasting Moments is 78 year old Jan Troell's
contribution to the unofficial alliance of Medicaid-qualifying working
film directors. That class, that this year alone, boasts Andrej Wajda,
Agnes Varda, Woody Allen, Manoel de Oliveira and Clint Eastwood's
one-two punch of The Changeling and Gran Torino. Plus last year
contributed wonderful new efforts by Francis Ford Coppola, Sidney
Lumet, Errol Morris and Claude Chabrol. Some of these recent films
haven't been perfect but they all lack the
cloying self-consciousness that comes from too much exposure to the
internet. Perhaps it's time the AARP started hosting its own awards
ceremony?

RIYL: After the Wedding, The Prize Winner of Defiance Ohio, 16 Years of Alcohol.

See also:

Martha
Polk's (appropriately) effusive review
over at What Is This Light and thoughts on photography at The Auters
Notebook.

The
Danish Film Institute's interview with the film's producer Thomas
Stenderup.

The Beaches of Agnes/Les Plages d’Agnès

Beaches of Agnes joins the ranks of recent films like Of Time and the
City and My Winnipeg (and to a lesser extent Waltz with Bashir and
Hunger), memoir-style films. The genre of late has been focused on a
connection to a place and how that place has shaped a person's life. In
contrast to focusing on the time the film-maker chooses to stop
experiencing life and start reflecting on the past with some sense of
finality.

Starting with her birth in wartime Brussels (just
like Jean-Claude Van Damme!) Agnes Varda traces her extensive
film-making career in the French New Wave scene. Detours through Los
Angeles during the 60s and back again to France as her husband Jacques
Demy died a slow, ineffable death from AIDS. Varda fans will recognize
the (miraculously unchanged) settings her past films: the village
scenes from La Pointe Courte, the woods-y picnic spots from Le Bonheur,
the barren off-season vineyards from Vagabond and the Parisian open-air
markets from Cleo 5 to 7 and The Gleaners and I.

Varda's
charming narration and bohemian life story are their own reward. Former
collaborators like Harrison Ford, Gerard Depardieu, Jane Birkin and
Alexander Calder all participate but never as mere talking heads.
Birkin, in a full suit of armor, rides a horse down a Paris street
playing a modern Joan of Ark. Jim Morrison and Chris Marker also make
appearances respectively through archival footage and cardboard cut
outs of the artist's signature cat illustrations.

This is remarkable documentation of a remarkable life. Fans of
Varda's films who have never had the privilege of seeing her
installation work clearly realize that her true heart is in being a
visual artist. The film opens with a group of harried assistants trying
to find ways to prop up dozens of mirrors in the sand on the beach
while Varda walks through them introducing herself to the camera. In
another scene she tracks down the villagers whose playful rowboat
scenes as children brought some levity to the story of a fracturing
marriage in her first feature film, La Pointe Courte. They remember the
experience fondly and the town has named a street after her. She
convinces the now middle-aged men to push a cart around the town
projecting films onto a sheet while discussing the man on the screen
who has long since passed away. It's a depiction of how an artist, even
one who's made an indelible mark in her field, can still feel like a
culmination of her shortcomings. The feeling is playful but honest, a
combination I, as a total neophyte, rarely associate with contemporary
art.

The first Bosnian film to win the Grand Prize at the Cannes Film
Festival's International Critics Week focuses on six women living in a
small village one year after the war has ended. All of the men
(including male children) have been rounded up and killed by the
Serbian army. The surviving women work hard to keep the village's only
industry, jam and sauerkraut production operational. It's grueling work
to create a delicate product that the women then transport in handcarts
through rough mountainous paths to sell on the roadside. We see the
women raise the orphaned children left behind all the while trying to
keep each other's spirits up with games and craft projects but the fact
remains, the only commonality they have is that their former middle
classic lives have been transformed by tragedy. Each of them still
holds out secret hope their husbands, sons and fathers somehow survived
and will someday return. When two Serbian businessmen representing a
commercial real estate developer show up with an offer to buy their
land each woman is forced to re-examine the reality of her situation
and what her priorities moving forward will be.

Like many of
the wonderful documentaries from this area (some of which my company, A
Million Movies a Minute distributes), the film contrasts of the
breathtaking beauty of this area with the horrendous things its people
have endured. At the start, the somewhat self-conscious diversity of
the group threatens to be something akin to a Slavic United Colors of
Benneton ad: a Muslim, a Christian, a bawdy dame, a thrill-seeking
younger woman, an elderly woman who spends her time working the loom
and a demanding, bed-ridden mother-in-law. But director Aida Begić
let's their stories unfold naturally. The film never condescends to
think an audience will understand their situation by the end of the
film.

Portland International Film Festival also featured works
this year from Poland's Andrzej Wajda and Sweden's Jan Troell two film
directors who have resisted the siren call of Hollywood and dedicated
their massive talents to reflect upon each of their country's complex
histories. That the exquisite Snow and Jasmila Zbanic's powerful 2006
film Grbavica: Land of My Dreams were both directorial debuts from
Bosnia-Herzegovenia indicates both an exciting new chapter in
film-making at large and what Cintra Wilson calls 'the cultural
conversation', providing a voice to a group of people who have mostly
been spoken for in the past.

RIYL: Secret Life of Words, Backstage, I've Loved You So Long, No Man's Land.